The current issue of Computers in Libraries introduced me to an open source chat reference software called RAKIM. The article, Implementing RAKIM Open Source Chat Reference Software, describes how librarians at Midlands Technical College decided to try this package (mostly because it’s free), and their impressions of its capabilities and limitations. A couple of the interesting features that caught my eye include the ability for librarians to have their own or shared bookmarks, and their own or shared scripts they can push to the patron. If a patron logs in and no librarian is available, s/he will be routed to the e-mail reference page. The software allows the librarian to push a page to the remote user, but does not allow co-browsing. The other drawback is that it does require a little technical know-how to get up and running, requiring Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. If you’re already comfortable with LAMP, you might want to give this a try. There are some screenshots available as well.
Here’s a direct link to the article for those of you with Academic Search Premier.
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4 Responses to “RAKIM Open Source Chat Reference Software”
We’ve been using RAKIM at the University of Winnipeg for over a year now and it has served us well. It is simple and seems to work with just about any patron environment we have run into. We had started our service with HumanClick, then moved to LSSI, which was an experience from hell: a bloated product that only worked properly 30% of the time, at least for us.
I used RAKIM a few weeks ago in an all-day workshop I gave and it was easy to get the class up and running to try RAKIM. If we had been using some of the other products it would have taken us all day just for that the vRef app 🙁 Our Student Services people are also giving RAKIM a try: they are using it for Career Counselling and are looking at it for providing help for online registration. Worth a look – since it is open source, the more people who use it the better it will become!
Thanks for the info Mark, I may pop in as a secret shopper to experience it as an end user. What about the lack of co-browsing – how to you compensate for what would seem to be a pretty important feature in a VR product?
The best way to explain it is that we don’t miss it 🙂 We can push pages and that seems to meet the need 90% of the time. We had co-browsing when we had LSSI, so we do have a sense of how that feature can be used. The problem is that it is also the most problematic feature, at least when we used it: it broke more than it worked. Now, if it worked well and with all clients, that could be a different story…
Paul, talk to Peter Binkley about Rakoon. It was a hackfest project from last year’s Access. I don’t know if Peter has gotten any farther with it, but it showed some potential.
Previously I had worked on this by hacking on an anonymous CGI proxy, but it would run into problems with popups. Conceptually this all got worked out in the hackfest (although it’s probably mostly forgotten now).
Anyway, Mark is probably right… pushing pages is probably enough.